Conjugal Precepts (1-4)

Solon advised that the bride should eat a quince before she entered the nuptial sheets; intimating thereby, in my opinion, that the man was to expect his first pleasures from the breath and speech of his new-married bed-fellow.

In Boeotia it is the custom, when they veil the virgin bride, to set upon her head a chaplet of wild asparagus, which from a thorny stalk affords a most delicious fruit, to let us understand that a new-married woman, discreetly brooking at the beginning the first distastes of marriage restraints, grows yieldingly complaisant at length, and makes conforming wedlock a happiness to each. And indeed such husbands who cannot bear with the little disdains and first froppishness of imprudent youth are like to those that choose the sour grapes and leave to others the ripe delicious clusters. On the other side, those young ladies that take a disdain to their husbands by reason of their first debates and encounters may be well compared to those that patiently endure the sting but fling away the honey.

It especially behooves those people who are newly married to avoid the first occasions of discord and dissension; considering that vessels newly formed are subject to be bruised and put out of shape by many slight accidents, but when the materials come once to be settled and hardened by time, nor fire nor sword will hardly prejudice the solid substance.

Fire takes speedy hold of straw or hare’s fur, but